There are a lot of racist standards for black women, particularly around hair.

Wait, chicks are going to stop wearing makeup?

Dudes are going to be so pissed off when they find they can leave the house in 5 minutes as opposed to 45 minutes.

So what is "performative masculinity"?

Does it involve picking up the check?

Does this mean women will be told that they should be swooning over a calendar featuring month after month of pictures of men who resemble "a male wino with a beer gut?" Or will men still have to work out, groom, and be successful in order to be attractive to women?

Some perspective from Heather Mallick in the Toronto Sun, September 1998:

Ordinary men are not represented in fiction. It has only just occurred to me how destructive this must be for men.

As rotten as it may be for women to have to look at endless images of unreally sexed-up women, how terrible it must be for men who are force-fed a diet of action men and high-earners.

Face it, if I want to be more attractive, I can help things along by, for one thing, quitting stuffing my face. I have that option.

But if I look at the way men are represented in the endless novels I am sent for review, I know this: If you men want to be more attractive, you have to foil the blowing up of American embassies worldwide or you have to earn at least US$200,000 a year. You have to be expensive meat.

There are a lot of racist standards for black women, particularly around hair.

NicoleK at May 14, 2020 10:48 PM

Set, and enforced by, wait for it.,. other black women.

Twenty years from now, Ms. Wilk will complain bitterly that she's living alone with 27 cats and can't find a man who appreciates her for herself.

Oh, we'll appreciate you for yourself just fine. From over here. Waaaaaaaay over here.

Heather Mallick's point is interesting, but ultimately not applicable, since most women aren't holding out for the SEAL Team 6 type, and the Elon Musk's of the world are few and far between. So women make do with the Joe Schmo who floats their boat.

To be fair IRA most men are willing to settle for less than Katherine Langford. So that goes for both genders. A bigger difference is men are used to being told no and being put down. At this point the discrimination against men in education is pretty obvious. After 12 odd years of that the fact that fiction is full of fictional people doesn't bother people that much.

Heather Mallick's point is interesting, but ultimately not applicable, since most women aren't holding out for the SEAL Team 6 type, and the Elon Musk's of the world are few and far between. So women make do with the Joe Schmo who floats their boat. ~ I R A Darth Aggie at May 15, 2020 6:41 AM

I see very few women who hold George Costanza as their ideal man. They may settle for him, but they don't fantasize about him.

Wilk is decrying that women are held to impossible standards, both by men as well as by other women. She thinks men are not. Mallick disagrees. When was the last time anyone was willing to charge the gates of hell behind a beta male? Or swooned in his presence?

A female comic once observed, "Men marry a woman hoping she won't change. Women marry a man hoping he will change."

As such, women are prepared to accept more flaws in a mate than men are, but they still don't hold that flawed man as the ideal. Otherwise "Dad" calendars would outsell firefighter calendars. Otherwise Chris Farley's SNL male stripper would have been considered as "sexy" as Patrick Swayze's and the joke would have fallen flat.

Both men and women are being held to the impossible ideal of the opposite sex, as well as the impossible ideal of their own sex. Now, to what ideals the other 55 genders are being held is anyone's guess.

The best part of this pandemic is seeing my coworkers on video chat not giving an eff, sans makeup, looking like hell.

*There are a lot of racist standards for black women, particularly around hair. -Nicole K*

It's true. A friend of mine (half black, half south Asian) recently had to push back at her job and ask why her natural, well-maintained undercut shave was a problem, but her white female coworker's red mohawk (and patterns shaved into the side of her head) was not. And why her male colleagues wearing their hair naturally (and scraggly) were not facing pushback about their "grooming." Oh, Austin.

Interestingly, my dad (who has been crotchety since his 30s) was a trailblazer for pointing out in the '90s that his law firm's leadership seemed "overly concerned" about the "professionalism" of the black employees (who were actually grooming, braiding and shaping their hair and following the dress code to a T) but not about the professionalism of white employees who would show up looking like they just rolled out of bed.

Back when I worked at a fast food restaurant, I got away with so much (including showing up with wet hair), and my ginger (male) coworker had poofy hair that stood out from his head like a lion's mane. While a black coworker (who kept her hair natural but cropped close to her head and immaculately shaped) got a talking-to about what my manager deemed a "fro."

Yeah, Isab, this is a real thing. And other black women may be pressuring each other because of the reality of the work world.

Yeah, Isab, this is a real thing. And other black women may be pressuring each other because of the reality of the work world.

NicoleK at May 15, 2020 10:30 AM

I think they are pressuring each other because of the same kinds of inter female evolutionary competition, Amy talks about here frequently. Work has nothing to do with it.

I have difficult to manage hair, very fine, and kinda thin, and have gotten plenty of pushback in the workplace about it, especially when I was young.

However having worked with many black women in the military, they have a hair, and fingernail culture ( and expectations about it) that totally put midwestern and Rocky Mountain farm girl values of simple neat and serviceable to shame. Same with the clothes.

I’m old now, so no one but the most intrusive Karens even care how I do my hair, or what I wear, but I still get way more attention from men than I am interested in reciprocating.

At my age, most men are interested in signs of health and wealth. A lifetime of fairly parsimonious behavior has left me well situated in both areas. Also, I can cook. :-)

I live and worked for 30 years in a majority black city. While there's a definite premium put on having "good" (caucasian-type) hair, in the year 2020 does anyone have any way of knowing if that's still a product of racism? In my experience, black people are at least as attentive to their dress and grooming as any other group. In my opinion, I think they may be more so, and this holds whether they have jobs where they may theoretically be pressured to make the effort, or whether they are never-employed career criminals. In the courthouse, where every socio-economic and racial group in the city intersect and interact, it was rare for me to see an unkempt black person. That goes for black professionals, black police and sheriffs, black courtroom personnel, and the defendants, crime victims, and families thereof. On the other hand, it is not uncommon to see members of the white underclass show up in clothes that look like they were just pulled out of a pile, and the women's attention to their beauty consists of slicking their hair back in harsh ponytails and maybe applying a lot of black eyeliner. The trend is also to pluck their eyebrows out of existence. Makes even the twenty-year-olds look fifty.

Does this writer think women don't judge men? Here is a statistic: the more money the man makes the lower the rate of divorce. Most guys realize this. One of the first things a teenage boy aspires to is owning a car. There is even a song about it "No Scrubs by TLC".
Everyone looks better if they take a little care of themselves.
A survey was done of male and female college students shown pictures of the opposite sex. Men rated women nicely on a bell curve (half above average and half below, reflecting reality). Women rated 80% of men below average, which of course is nonsense, but it reflects women's innate desire to marry up.
Women can gain a lot of leverage with men by being nice and charming. A rather unattractive woman can get a pretty good looking husband this way. Men are really moved by personality, in spite of "men only want one thing" propaganda.

Cabbage heads and their dressing: the salad days of internet discourse.

"I looked hot yesterday"

Was the A/C broken? ;-)